SHIP GUIDANCE VIA NONLINEAR ADAPTIVE CONTROL SYNTHESIS

The paper is concerned with the problem of adaptive ship track-keeping system control synthesis. It is assumed that a nonlinear ship dynamics (model structure) is (partially) unknown so it has to be reconstructed. To this end it has been proven that proportional state feedback plus adaptation via functional approximators are able to assure its asymptotic stability. This form of controller permits on-line compensation of unknown model nonlinearities which leads to satisfactory tracking performance. An interesting feature of the system is that the whole process control is performed without requisite asymptotic convergence of approximator parameters to the postulated ‘true’ values. The system's performance, which has been tested via Matlab/Simulink simulations, confirms the efficiency of the adopted solution technique.